Director's Corner

Sachio Komamiya is the chair of the Linear Collider Board, the oversight committee for ILC and CLIC. In today’s guest corner, he explains what the recent “Summary Report” for a Japanese advisory panel means for the project. It’s good news, he says, and urges the community to demonstrate the need for the next big machine.

Feature

The summary of discussions published by the ILC Advisory Group to Japan’s funding agency MEXT is subject of a lot of discussion within the community. Why was it published now, what does it mean? NewsLine spoke to Satoru Yamashita from the University of Tokyo to find out more. Read also this week’s Director’s Corner.

Around the World

Detector R&D for future projects has just received a boost in Germany. Six universities are receiving some 1.8 million Euros from the German ministry of education and research (BMBF) for the next three years – twice the amount that was available before. The project will concentrate on improving the time projection chamber for the ILD detector, one of the two planned ILC detector concepts, and the hadronic calorimeter based on SiPMs.

Image of the week

In the last issue we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the ILC-constituing meeting in Snowmass. For those who missed it, here’s the timeline of linear collider development since 2005. We’re also still collecting your personal memories of highlights from the last ten years and hopes for the next ten!

In the News

ILC(国際リニアコライダー)を子どもたちにも理解し­てもらおうと、女子学生が小学校で授業を行うことになった。クイズ形式のプリントを用意したり、また、グル­ープワークで子どもたちの考えを引き出す時間を設けたりと、さまざまな工夫を凝らしな­がら、ILCの役割を説明した。(Female university student will give ILC lessons at elementary schools, aiming to gain understandings about the ILC project, and had a trial session at Iwate University. Students devised ways of explaining about the ILC effectively preparing printed quiz or providing thinking time.)

Three years after the announcement of the discovery of a new particle, the so-called Higgs boson, the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations present for the first time combined measurements of many of its properties, at the third annual Large Hadron Collider Physics Conference (LHCP 2015). By combining their analyses of the data collected in 2011 and 2012, ATLAS and CMS draw the sharpest picture yet of this novel boson.

文部科学省は２０１６年度予算の概算要求で、超大型加速器「国際リニアコライダー（ＩＬＣ）」計画関連として、加速器技術の高性能化の開発費など計１億１０００万円を計上した。(MEXT submitted its 2016 rough estimate of their budget to the government, which included the ILC related budget of 110 million yen.)

これまで同省のＩＬＣ関連予算は１４、１５年度にＩＬＣ計画の実施可否判断に関する調査検討費として５千万円計上。１５年度はＩＬＣにも貢献できる加速器技術の高度化を図るための要素技術開発費に３千万円を計上していたが、１６年度概算要求案はこれまで以上に具体的課題への対応に踏み込む形だ。(MEXT has allocated 50 million yen ILC related budget on FY 2014 and 2015 for the research on the project toward the decision making. For FY 2015, additional 30 million for the R&D was also allocated. 2016 budget is funded to deal with the identified issues.)

Construction of the ILC costs 1 trillion yen, and it will be internationally shared. But I think Japan should go ahead even if Japan needs to cover them all, because those cost will be used in Japan, and generate employments and incomes of citizens in Japan.

「国際リニアコライダー（ＩＬＣ）」を、北上山地に造りたいと岩手県が熱望している。国際協力で建設するが、費用は１兆円以上。文部科学省は予算のめどがたたないこともあり慎重だ。造るべきかどうか。あなたはどう思いますか？ (Iwate prefecture is eager to construct the ILC at Kitakami mountain. It will be constructed by international collaboration, but the cost will exceed 1 trillion yen. MEXT is deliberate since the budget is uncertain. How do you think? Should Japan proceed to the ILC construction?)